Building the Self-Organized Team Anywhere

Mark Kilby is an agile coach who, for over two decades, has cultivated more distributed, dispersed and virtual teams than co-located teams. Currently, Mark serves as an agile coach with Sonatype, a distributed agile software development company focusing on automation of software supply chains. Previously, Mark led Agile transformations, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Mark's book, From Chaos to Successful Distributed Agile Teams, is co-authored with Johanna Rothman and will be published in August 2018. A sample of the book is available now via http://markkilby.com and Leanpub.com.

When I was following more traditional project management approaches over a decade ago, I was under tremendous stress to get my staff to do the right work and meet the right deadlines. In making the shift to agile approaches and to self-organized teams, I learned to establish goals instead of deadlines. Also, I went from controlling resources (including people) to influencing work environments. This led me to discover approaches to build self-managed teams, both co-located and distributed.

Unexpected Benefits
In moving to agile, a major benefit was that I no longer needed to direct people and activities. Instead, I was free to focus on a more strategic level.

Also, the agile self-organized teams came up with a wider variety of options and better solutions than I ever could alone. Moreover, I was far less stressed to come up with all the answers and have my team deliver on time. With distributed teams, they can be even more creative because they have an even more diverse experience (i.e., they don’t sit in the same office together). So, a self-organized distributed team can actually react in more unique ways and achieve solutions more quickly.

Defining the Self-Organized Team
First, a "team" is a collection of people working toward a common goal. A "self-